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Reviewed by Alexander Murdoch (School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh)Published on H-Albion (August, 2007)

Margaret Sankey published a fascinating article co-written with Professor Daniel Szechi, now of the University of Manchester, in Past and Present in 2001. Admirers of that article will welcome the publication of this book, based on her Auburn University Ph.D. thesis of 2002. By analyzing the treatment of prisoners taken during the Jacobite rebellion of 1715-16 in Scotland and England, Sankey is able to explore the uncertain structure of the new kingdom of Great Britain, less than a decade after its creation, as well as the manner in which George I and those who served him established the Hanoverian dynasty in the British monarchy. Nothing would ever be quite the same again in eighteenth-century Britain. Sankey's book has been followed by the publication of Daniel Szechi's masterpiece in 2006, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion, and the two books complement each other usefully.

Sankey makes the point that there really were quite a few prisoners taken in England during the rebellion, particularly after the siege of Preston, whereas in Scotland the unsuccessful Jacobite army eventually melted away in the face of the advancing Hanoverian army, able to draw on Dutch and Swiss soldiers sent from the Netherlands under the terms of Britain's treaty of mutual defence with the United Provinces. The argument over who would pay for their intervention continued for decades, but their presence ensured that even the arrival of the Old Pretender James VIII and III himself could not revive the Jacobite cause in Scotland. What Sankey is able to establish is that in contrast with England, where state executions for treason were used to demonstrate the power and authority of the new dynasty and existing regime, in Scotland Whig defenders of that regime had no interest in apprehending and executing their fellow countrymen. Why? The instability of the union with England and Wales was clearly part of the answer. That instability was rooted in the deep sectarian divisions in Scottish society that were part of the legacy of its history in the seventeenth century. There were many in Scotland who saw union with England (Wales did not come into it) as a means of transcending those divisions rather than achieving final victory for one side (Covenanting and Presbyterian) over another (Jacobite and Episcopalian). The second duke of Argyll, who in many ways had made the union possible, ensured that the peace which followed Jacobite rebellion in Scotland was not a vengeful one.

Professor Sankey makes part of this case, but is more successful as a historian of Jacobitism than as a historian of Scotland. She draws the contrast between the treatment of Jacobite prisoners in England with what happened in Scotland well, but has difficulty taking the point farther. This is not helped when she twice cites the major study of post-union Scotland published by Christopher A. Whatley of the University of Dundee (2000) under the name "Andrew Whatley" (p. 148, ref. 41, and in the bibliography, p. 168). She does this reviewer the honor of rendering my name correctly, but she presents as fact a serious mis-reading of brief references relating to the 1715 rebellion and its aftermath in my own monograph on mid-eighteenth-century Scottish politics (on both pp. xviii and 152). Professor T. M. Devine's successful textbook on modern Scottish History, The Scottish Nation: A History 1700-2000 (1999), is similarly ransacked for straw men to be used to score points against in a manner that detracts rather than enhances this book's value.[1] Professor Szechi, in the preface to his own book, praises this book and expressed the hope that it will be the first of many from the pen of its author. I hope that this will be true, and that these future works will not strain to create false dichotomies in a historiography that should seek to understand critically, rather than perpetuate, the deep divisions in Scottish and British society at the beginning of the eighteenth century that provided the basis for the Jacobite rebellion of 1715.

Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.